I had a paper prepared on this somewhere but lost it so I’ll redo it.

 So you want to connect to the internet

Our club, The He-man woman haters's club decided it's time to get connected to the internet. It is after all the internet age. So we went out and bought the domain names from a  registrar. We bought two, HeManWomanHatersClub.org and HMWHC.org since we're an organization and some of our member's don't spell very well. 

Then we found out owning the domain didn't do us any good. We wanted to broadcast our message to the world. So we set our smartest member, Buckwheat, to find out what we needed to do next. 

The Domain Name System

The domain name system is broken down into a series of names separated by dots. The most specific name is on the left and the least specific name is on the right.We don't have any names yet but we have plans. Spanky's computer could be named spanky.HMWHC.org. If we grow we could create a couple of subdomains. LA will be the subdomain for Los Angeles and NYC will be the subdomain for New York City. Spanky's computer will change to Spanky.LA.HMWHC.org.

We can then have three web servers www.HMWHC.org, www.LA.HMWHC.org and www.nyc.HMWHC.org. That way we have the national server with our message and local activities can be planned without giving everyone access to our main web server. We don't have to call our web server www but it's customary and people are used to it.

 There aretop level domain servers for the rightmost domains, .com, .org, .edu and they keep track of the 'authoritative servers for the second level domains like our HMWHC and HeManWomanHatersClub. We can refer NYC or LA subdomains to third level or tertiary servers if we want, or keep them all together. 

Everysecond level  domain has an authoritative server and it's listed on the domain registration.

Not only does the domain server have a list of all the names, it also keeps track of where incoming mail should go with an "MX record". A domain can have more than one MX record, in that case there's a preference number listed. Try to deliver the message to the mail server with the lowest number, then try the second lowest until all mail servers are exhausted. 

Unfortunately, here's where Buckwheat found that all the domain name system does is translate human friendly names like spanky.hmwhc.org to ip addresses. To get connected we're gonna need some ip addresses.

IP addresses

Each device  connected to the internet needs to be found so it's given and address. Since microprocessers are designed to do math well these addresses are totally numeric. The specific number is called an IP address. Most ip addresses are accessible to everyone on the internet or public although some addresses were set aside as private addresses and not accessible over the internet. 

Multiple device types need to be web connected, routers that direct traffic and  computers that exchange information are two types. Since each of these devices needs it's own address the generic term "Host" is used to refer to an internet connected device.

 To be on the internet we  needed  some IP addresses of our own. We can buy them from  ARIN but they sell them in blocks of 1500 or so and need to be using half of them to get renewed. Since our club is not nearly that large our only choice is to purchase the necessary  ip addresses from our internet provider.That was too expensive for our club.

 Fotunately there's NAT which combines multiple hosts into one IP address. Using nat our entire club house network can sit behind one Nat router which has a public ip address given to us by our Internet service provider. The  Nat router  keeps track of which inside host asked for what internet information and forward the requested information back to it. Our internal network is connected together using private IP addresses. This keeps cost down since it's cheap to get internet service from a phone or cable provider. 

Nat works well if we're always requesting information but there's no allowance for someone requesting information from our network. If someone sends or requests information that we didn't request the nat device doesn't know what to do with it so it discards it. That helps security, but does little for us trying to spread our message to others. 

Web Hosting. 

So we decided to rent a web server to spread our message. The first decision is shared or dedicated ip address. Why is there even a choice? 

Web servers are really programs that run on a server. It's software not a physical box. The web server hardware has one ip address  but the program knows which site to use by the URL. If Darla ever decided to start the SheWomanManHatersClub.org on the same physical server both sites would resolve to the same IP address using DNS but the program would pick the correct page from the correct site based on the URL.  

 So why would anyone want a dedicated IP address? A web site has to be uniquely identified to conduct secure transactions. It's just the way it is. Since most hardware servers can respond to multiple IP addresses your site will be running using shared hardware, but only our hmwhc.org web site will be the only one with that IP address making it unique and allowing us to get a SSL certificate. 

 There are other options for our club. Most web hosts will provide several levels of dedicated hardware servers that they manage for us. They'll also allow us to buy a server, connect it to their network and manage it ourselves (colocation). Both of these options are pretty expensive, and we won't be realizing much revenue from our site, so we won't be doing either of them.

We decided to go with a dedicated IP web site on a shared server. Our web host provides DNS serivices so we changed our domain records with our registrar to reflect our web host's name servers. This will then update the top level domain servers.

 We set up our web host to redirect all requests to HeManWomanHatersClub.org to HMWHC.org so that we didn't have to maintain two separate web sites.